The promise of the extraordinary. The surprise of something new. The power to bring change. It's... It's... It's... Life Changing Box, a Lowe-created site and Facebook game that involves a box, co-ordinated game play and prizes. Beginning today and running for a month, no one's saying who it's for right now so, if you care, you're just going to have to play the game and wait.

It's all fairly intricate but here are some overview points from the release:

There are 10 boxes total in the game

To gain possession of a box, users use a currency called a Touch

All players get 24 "Touches" per day

Each Touch enters the player into a Round

At the beginning of each Round, the box will randomly jump to one of the players who entered that Round

The player given the box holds it for the entirety of the Round, which lasts between 30 minutes and 8 hours, randomly decided by the application

If the box doesn't open in a Round for the player, a new Round will begin and everyone must Touch the box again to participate

20 prizes will be awarded with values ranging from $400 to $14,000

If you invite a friend to the application and they win, you win a duplicate prize

Let's hope it is actually life changing and not some lame promotion for some lame brand. All the details are here, the box is here and the game is here.

What? What? What? Universal Motown just did this yesterday for Ashanti and now Mike's Hard Hard Lemonade? Please. Make it stop! While it is kind of fun to see your own image (even if it is an old, crappy one) affixed to a faux news story under the guise of a marketing promotion, these things are getting tiresome.

Of course, they're only getting tiresome to those of us who write about this stuff 24/7. Perhaps "normal" people actually like this stuff. Ya now, it's the "Ooo, Ooo. Look ! I'm on TV!" Yea. It's for all those idiots that stand outside the GMA studio in the morning waving like lunatics to the camera. Yea. This is for those people. And, since there seems to be a lot more of those wackos out there than us more refine advertising types, it's clear this personalized, faux news report thing has legs. Nice ones.

Yesterday, in preparation for all of the live WWDC tweeting action, Twitter encouraged users to follow WWDC, Apple, iPhone and Steve Jobs related tweets on Summize. It made sense to do so considering the trouble Twitter's had recently just trying to handle the ordinary amount of tweeting on its site.

Showtime did it to promote Dexter. Now Universal Motown is doing it to promote Ashanti's new CD. Like the Dexter promotion, which allowed people to send customized messages that appeared to be news reports of the recipient's death by serial murder.

In the Ashanti promotion, a customized news report can be created and sent to a friend. In the report, it's noted recent murders are linked to Ashanti's new single, "The Way That I Love You," which is about how a woman gets revenge on a cheating boyfriend

Photrade, a free photography website, has launched in beta. With a host of features, Photrade, adds a level of commerce to what sites like Flickr provide. All the Flickr-like features are in abundance on Photrade but layered on top are tools which allow photographers to "share, protect and make money" from their uploaded photography.

Like a mashup between a social photography site and a stock photography site, Photrade helps photographers and those in need of photography do business together. On top of that, an advertising system allows photographers to make money anytime their photos are viewed.

Working with The Advance Guard and Linkstorm. Coke has launched Coke Tags, a widget and Facebook application, currently in beta, which lets people aggregate various forms of content and share it by placing the widget on their Facebook page, blog and OpenSocial social networking sites.

The Coke Tag, apart from the obvious promotion of Coke is also promoting we8, "an artistic and cultural exchange, uniting eight of China's most exciting artists and design firms with eight of the West's most progressive musicians to design a vision and soundtrack that celebrates the infinite possibilities that await when the doors are flung open between East and West."

When Ben Relles created Barely Political and hired Amber Lee Ettinger to play the role of Obama Girl, it was little more than a fun little one-off that no one thought would rise to the level of popularity it did. Month after month, Obama Girl videos appeared and month after month, Obama, himself, kept winning primaries moving closer and closer to a potential seat in the White House as out next President.

Apparently in the works for over six months, ZobZee promises to be the the killer social app which will put Twitter out of its misery and lend some order to the insanity that is FriendFeed. ZobZee's premise? Why type when you can just think your social inanities and have them automatically shared with the world?

Deep Focus CEO and avid Twitter user Ian Schafer is, as an experiment, auctioning off sponsorship of his Twitter profile and feed. The sponsorship will consist of a branded background image and the replacement of his icon with an image of the brand's choice.

Shafer has set the starting bid at $400. Let's do some math. $400 for one month. Schafer has 377 followers. He tweets 8-10 times per day. If we assume those days to be weekdays, that's about 200 tweets per month (10 tweets X 20 days). Using old-school metrics, the sponsorship will deliver 3,770 impression per day or 75,400 per month. Matching that to the $400 cost nets a CPM of $5.31.